If porn and shopping were the two dominant themes of the first internet era, it's possible that, in thesetroubled financial times, porn and cats - though not, thankfully, together (icanhascheezburger has strict moderators) - are becoming the two dominant themes of the second.

Yeah, OK, sure, you know what else is kind of funny? The word "troubled", go ahead, say it to yourself a few times with different inflections (and in the voice of different folks, like say Barbara Walters or Tom Brokaw)

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1st=ARPANET, you know, scientist talking to scientist, what it was designed for in the first place, circa early 70s.

2nd=ACADEMIA, sometime around the 80s when academic institutions started using the thing beyond the hard sciences, mainly e-mail and a few boards, circa mid 80s.

3rd=BBS, the dial-up age of 70k porn jpgs, 486 based computers usually had modems, Windows 3.11 brought in a bunch of new users that were intimidated by the MS-DOS interface, circa early 90s

4th=AOL/Netscape, The birth of the 'real' internet, still dial-up based, but a little faster, a lot more sites to visit, coincided with the expansion of the market, the DotBoom of the late 90s, and the release of Win98, along with Drudge breaking the Lewinsky story, suddenly folks realized there are non-MSM voices out there with real content.

5th=Broadband age, finally, video comes to the internet (and with it, lots and lots of video porn), personal blogs proliferate first, then political/personal blogs, then everybody and his grandmother has a blog by 2005. Era begins around 2003, really comes into its own with the Rather/TANG memo controversy.

6th=Ubiquity, wifi and internet enabled phones begin to take off, still not there yet, but getting there, evolving, some countries are there already, but the United States is bigger and more complicated than those countries that already have internet everywhere at all times. Current era, defined by twittering idiots by and large (and the cellphone self portrait)